by Paul Nurse
This aristocratic man of parts is best known today for his histories as well as his pioneering contributions to Arabian Nights research. Von Hammer-Purgstall is among the first oriental scholars—certainly among the first important ones—to peer behind the stories in an attempt to identify the work’s origins. One of his first tasks in Constantinople was to search for a full, or at least fuller, Alf Laila wa Laila manuscript. In this he failed, but it seems he later came upon an extensive manuscript in Cairo containing details not found in the Galland Manuscript.
Unfortunately, this text, like Galland’s mystery fourth Arabic volume, was lost, but not before von Hammer-Purgstall made a French translation while still in Constantinople. This text has also been lost, although a German version was published in 1825. Frankly, from what can be gleaned from the German translation, von Hammer-Purgstall’s version of the Nights was not very good, as he does the same kind of adapting and “improving” as many others, fashioning an abridged edition suitable for everyone but useless in providing anything closer to Alf Laila wa Laila.
Fortunately, “the learned Baron’s” contributions go further than producing a mediocre new translation. Intrigued by Louis Langles’s conjecture about some stories originating in India, von Hammer-Purgstall built on Langles’s theories to push things further. After studying al-Masudi’s and Ibn al-Nadim’s writings, he published groundbreaking articles in 1826 and 1839 issues of the French Journal Asiatique. These stressed the importance of Persia in the development of Alf Laila wa Laila, postulating that the work had absorbed Indian stories, then augmented them with indigenous Persian tales to create Hazar Afsanah before transferring the work wholesale to the Arabs sometime before the tenth century, where another layer of stories was added to form the earliest versions of The Thousand and One Nights.
This was a giant leap in determining the work’s origins. But for his troubles, von Hammer-Purgstall’s theories brought him professional grief, as he entered into a rather genial theoretical conflict with the eminent English Arabist Edward William Lane (Lane had his own theories and produced his own translation); a not-so-genial conflict with France’s great scholar Sylvestre de Sacy, who felt the tales were too innately “Arabic” to have come from Persia and India; and was roundly attacked by a figure much closer to home, de Sacy’s disciple Gustav Weil, whose German part-translation of the Nights began appearing after 1837. To some extent, this debate about the work’s background continues today, but there is no mistaking the importance of Baron Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall to the history of The Thousand and One Nights. By the time of his death in 1856, theories regarding the book’s origins were divided between those who believed in a multicultural background and those who clung to the belief that regardless of external influences, the Nights is essentially a product of the Arab literary tradition. That there was a debate at all is proof that by the Victorian Age, the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments was seen as more than the sum of its pleasing parts. By then it had grown beyond its vast readership to become a concern of the scholarly class, who to this day view the work as an evergreen creation possessing endless pathways of inquiry.
The search for the Arabic Nights reached a kind of climax in the first half of the nineteenth century, when the gathering of additional manuscripts led directly to the creation of the first printed texts of Alf Laila wa Laila. Barring some fantastic future find, four such printed works—known as Calcutta I, the Breslau, the Bulaq and Calcutta II—have become the standard Arabic editions for translators to work from, although their contents are far removed from early versions and all contain material which, strictly speaking, does not belong in the book. Be that as it may, these collections remain the only editions of the Nights that are not revisions or reprints of earlier versions, with three of these “recensions”—revised texts created in a critical manner—done entirely in response to the western fascination with the Nights’ bewitching world. Together, they finally saw the Nights appear in printed Arabic form, but the delay in their appearance requires a word of explanation.
Printing in Asia has a significantly longer history than in the West, even if it remained a less-developed art before the nineteenth century. By the 1400s, the idea of applying inked types to paper had spread from China to Korea, Japan and then Europe. This earliest form of printing, called “block printing” (inking multiple characters on carved wooden blocks), emerged in the eighth century CE, but within several centuries the idea of rearranging characters for each new page—adjustable or “movable” type—gained precedence and remained the chief method of printing until the arrival of digital technology in the 1980s. In Europe, and probably independent of any Asian printing developments that might have made their way west, the German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg spent years experimenting with hand-cranked wine and olive presses before printing two hundred copies of his famous Bible in the 1450s, accelerating the Renaissance by making printed texts available to an emerging and literate middle class. Within decades, printing presses appeared in Venice, Paris, London, even Spanish-conquered Mexico City. Soon an information explosion was underway in the West as printing progressed to the point where within a generation of Columbus’s voyages, European presses were capable of producing a text using Arabic script typeface.
In the paper-rich Middle East, block-printing techniques were used routinely in the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries for pamphlets and other small written works, but creating movable type based on classical Arabic script—which emphasizes calligraphy and joins the letters of some words—was difficult and decreased readability. Most texts within the Muslim world, then, continued to be laboriously hand-copied by scribes, a time-consuming process that meant it often took months or even years to produce a single volume.
There were also cultural questions about the actual value of printing as a craft, since, unlike the western Bible, there was no single eastern work—not even the Koran—that was sufficiently guaranteed to have a constant market and therefore make it commercially viable to print in large quantities. (Although the Koran was widely read by the literate, most had to memorize suras by rote.) Tied to this was a belief in some circles that as a series of texts, holy books were more sacred if they were handwritten—the product of devoted human labour—and that making such works by machine lessened their hallowed worth.
For these reasons, the craft of printing in the East, while developing initially in Asia, languished behind Europe and North America until well into the nineteenth century. Many of the first presses to appear in the eastern world—such as the first Arabic press in Cairo, installed by Napoleon Bonaparte to facilitate French investigations into Egyptology during the brief French occupation—came about as a result of the European presence, but they also acted as spurs toward the later development of indigenous Asian printing and therefore affected the creation of the first-ever printed Arabic versions of The Thousand and One Nights.
The first important recension of Arabic Nights stories came about some seventy years after Les mille et une nuits, but it was no more than a series of handwritten works from the Egyptian branch of Alf Laila wa Laila tales and no copies are known to survive today. More than a century later, this was dubbed the “Zotenberg Egyptian Recension” (ZER) after Hermann Zotenberg of France’s Bibliothèque nationale, a late-nineteenth-century librarian who made an intensive study of surviving Alf Laila wa Laila manuscripts in Europe. Zotenberg concluded that the bulk of these texts are Egyptian in origin with a few, like the Galland Manuscript, produced in Syria. One appeared to be a copy of an actual Baghdadi text, but it has since been shown to be a clever fake put together by the copyist Michael Sabbagh from various Nights manuscripts in Paris.
Most manuscripts, Zotenberg believed, were composed more recently, in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries, and possibly in response to the western interest in the Nights. However they came about, they were certainly younger by hundreds of years than the three-volume Syrian manuscript Galland found, which, after considerable effort
of examination and comparison to other manuscripts, Zotenberg pegged as being compiled sometime in the fourteenth century.* The Egyptian manuscripts, Zotenberg found, often contain more stories than their Syrian counterparts but tended to be more streamlined in the telling, leaving out details or other information found in Syrian tellings of the same tales.
Since a number of their stories are distorted to the point of incomprehensibility, the Egyptian texts could have been made hurriedly, with less care than had been taken with the Syrian manuscripts, again probably in response to the influx of interested Europeans looking for Alf Laila wa Laila manuscripts. All the same, ZER remains a series of handwritten works, a kind of grab bag of Arabic stories that may or may not belong to the earliest Nights. It was not until the early nineteenth century that the earliest printed Arabic texts were assembled as a by-product of the western fascination with the Arabian Nights.
Around 1813, in response to a request from the Honourable East India Company for a compilation of available Arabic Nights stories, a Calcutta language teacher at Fort William College named Sheikh Ahmed ibn Muhammad Shirwani edited a text for use as a teaching tool for Brits wanting to learn Arabic. This first printed text came about as a direct result of commercial politics—the outgrowth of an East India Company directive requiring its officials to familiarize themselves with Indian languages, especially Persian and Arabic, so native revenue-gatherers and judges could be replaced with Europeans. Over time, language training became a requirement for professional advancement within the company and later, within the British Crown’s Indian Civil Service; failure could result in non-promotion or even dismissal.
The text edited by Shirwani can be seen as part of this policy of enforced language instruction—a collection of Arabian Nights stories in Arabic designed for teaching that language through a familiar text, but not undertaken as a scholarly project. Printed in two volumes between 1814 and 1818, this “Shirwani Text”—better known as Calcutta I—was created under the direct patronage and support by the East India Company as a kind of school textbook for the British.
Recognizing that language teaching is best done through a work already well known to students, the collection covers only the first two hundred Nights—about a hundred to each volume—and is the first printed edition of Alf Laila wa Laila in existence. For all that, Calcutta I is a problematic text, since Sheikh Shirwani does not describe his manuscript sources and the text’s makeup remains vague. Also, it seems certain that Shirwani distorted things by modifying some stories and padding the text with outside material, including the Sindbad voyages taken from European editions.
There followed a gap of six years before the second text began appearing—a twelve-volume compilation known as the “Breslau Text” (1824–43). If anything, this work is even more problem-plagued than Calcutta I, since its first eight volumes were printed under the supervision of the German scholar Christian Maximilian Habicht and seem to have been cobbled together from sundry Nights and non- Nights collections.
Habicht claimed he had received a complete manuscript of Alf Laila wa Laila from Tunisia and it was from this full text that he began translating various Nights stories into German in 1824, publishing his results the following year. At the same time, Habicht began publishing in printed form the Arabic manuscript he claimed he’d been sent from North Africa. By the time of his death in 1839, eight volumes had been printed, but the work remained unfinished. Thereafter, a student of Habicht’s, Heinrich Fleischer, undertook the task of completing and (that word again) “improving” the text, publishing a final four volumes between 1842 and 1844 to make the Breslau Text the only “complete” Arabic text of the Nights containing a full 1001 Nights to appear in Europe, as well as the first printed text in any language to actually contain 1001 Nights of storytelling.
But in a repeat of the bogus “Aladdin” and “Ali Baba” manuscripts, it seems very likely that Habicht’s vaunted full “Tunisian” manuscript never existed. Like the Michael Sabbagh “Baghdadi” manuscript copy, Habicht’s work is a mishmash stitched together from material provided by different manuscripts of Alf Laila wa Laila floating around Paris (where Habicht worked for a time as part of the Prussian legation), other story collections and, when it appeared in 1835, the next printed Arabic edition, the Egyptian Bulaq Text.
Maximilian Habicht was no con artist. He had a solid background as a teacher of Arabic, studying with the esteemed Sylvester de Sacy in Paris before joining the faculty of the University of Breslau. But given the number of Nights frauds perpetrated in the decades following Les mille et une nuits, it must be asked why someone of his calibre would stoop to palming off a composite work as a complete edition of the Nights. To enhance his professional reputation as the man who uncovered the illusory “full” manuscript of The Thousand and One Nights? To reap the same kind of success as Antoine Galland and hopefully become wealthy from the effort?
Or perhaps Habicht’s desire to have and hold a full version of the Arabian Nights was merely an extreme case of that same desire found throughout the West. Trying to patch together an edition with 1001 Nights from various sources when the work’s origins are so obscure is not, as some have noted, such a terrible act in itself; it was, after all, the method by which Antoine Galland introduced the Nights to Europe in the first place. But most of Galland’s modifications were not done until after an arduous and fruitless search for a full Alf Laila wa Laila. By coming forward with a patchwork version he claimed was a complete Arabic Nights, Habicht muddied an already-confusing situation further by perpetuating the myth that an Alf Laila wa Laila manuscript containing an actual 1001 Nights of storytelling existed somewhere.
And yet, given the age, this is an almost understandable, if not quite forgivable, reaction. After enjoying what they thought to be the “Part-Nights” for so long, Europeans of the time must have felt compelled to track down a full, original version of this most famous Arabic-language book. The move toward a scientific worldview during the Enlightenment, when the earth and all that lay within it was believed to be subject to a systematic human understanding, meant a belief that discovery, followed by a process of codification, would fall naturally upon even those literary works whose fame rested on part-versions. For the Arabian Nights, having no original edition or author seems to have been no obstacle to the West’s hunger to find—or, if need be, invent—one.
Perhaps there was also a willful intent to assign at least some sense of authority to a book that was proving so hard to identify. For a time right after the first appearance of Les mille et une nuits, there were some who believed that Antoine Galland had produced the work entirely from his own imagination. Even when it became clear he was adapting an actual eastern work, Galland was still perceived in some way as at least one of the authors of a book he had rendered into a European language.
This perception has clung to most of those translators following Galland. We speak easily of the Scott edition of the Arabian Nights, or the Lane version, or the Payne and Burton editions, with their similarities and differences. For a book with a host of questions surrounding it, assigning a provisional authority to something reworked into another language is not an unattractive idea. The theory that each translator puts such a personal mark on a translated work that they earn a modicum of its creation has merit, especially when the book has no assigned author. Taking such a mutable work as the Nights and recreating it in Arabic or another language is tantamount to fashioning it anew, of rewriting it for another audience.
This is what the editors and translators of this puzzling collection have done time and again. They have rewritten, and continue to rewrite, the Arabian Nights in the same way as a filmmaker remakes a previous version of a motion picture by using the same essential elements, but still manages to create a new, individual work. By doing this from the time Europe began gathering manuscripts of Alf Laila wa Laila, the West has entered into an unspoken collaboration with the East to further develop The Thousand and One Nights.
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bsp; What has emerged bears only a faint resemblance to however early versions of the work looked, but is still in keeping with the idea of the Nights as an endlessly adaptable compendium of stories from distant lands. It can be claimed that the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments as the world knows the book today has become the co-operative product of both East and West—practically the only classic of world literature that has developed through the efforts of two cultures that are sometimes at violent odds with one another, but are capable of producing a work belonging equally to both.
With the Breslau Text considered conspicuously faulty, the next edition, the “Bulaq Text” of 1835, seen through the press by Sheikh Abd al-Rahman al-Safti al-Sharqawi, was a real step forward. Printed in the Bulaq suburb of Cairo, it was the product of the first indigenous printing press in Egypt (installed in 1821 by the viceroy, Muhammad Ali), as well as the only one of these four Arabic texts to be printed by Arabs. The collection is one of a series of fictional works in Persian, Arabic and Turkish published for Egypt’s elite; most had something like a thousand copies run off in what we would think of today as “limited editions.”
From the more uniform and correct Arabic used, the Bulaq Text appears founded on a single Egyptian manuscript of the Nights from the eighteenth century, although like Sheikh Shirwani, al-Sharqawi gives no indication of his sources. It could be that the manuscript was compiled by one of those scribes who fashioned a text of Alf Laila wa Laila because of the Nights’ popularity in the West and didn’t care about the stories used. Such is its general consistency, however, that the Bulaq Text quickly became a main source for most subsequent printed editions of the Nights, including an important English translation printed several years later and the four-volume Arabic “Macnaghten” or Calcutta II of 1839–42, from which the first uncensored translations were made.